I think part of the reason was that Europeans understood Clinton. Clinton thought like a Westerner. He was interested in the economy, trade, diplomacy, and understood that all of these things involved compromises between various entities. This sort of pragmatic mindset has been a hallmark of European thinking for literally hundreds of years. American politics, on the other hand, is intensely ideological. Whereas European politicians argue about things like farm subsidies, American politicians argue about highly abstract (and mostly irrelevent) things like the sanctity of this or that. Europeans are interested in what's "good" or "useful", while Americans are interested in what's "right".
What could Clinton have done about the Cole bombing? As history shows, trying to root out Al Queda and hunt down bin Laden is a non-trivial military operation. The USS Cole bombing happend in mid October, and it wasn't until well after the elections that it was clear that Al Queda was responsible. That places the earliest possible military operation sometime in late November.
For multiple reasons, a military action in that time frame was impossible. Even under normal circumstances, a President starting a major military operation in the last month of this term is unthinkable. In 2000, the situation was even trickier. Not only was Clinton a lame duck President, but his party had lost a very heated, very bitter, and very controversial election. Any military action at that point would've been viewed by the Republicans, who remember at this time are still isolationist and care nothing about terrorism, as a cheap trick to throw a wrench into Bush's presidency early-on. It would've been viewed by everybody as petty retaliation for the results of the election. Moreover, it would've been terribly ineffective anyway. Transitions are complicated, and switching administrations right in the middle would've been a massive handicap to any potential operation.
Clinton did exactly what he should've done in his position, that was to give his successor the information he had and let him deal with the problem.
John Stewart's show is easily as informative as most "real" news shows that people watch. Watch the local news down here in Atlanta some time then tell me Stewart's show isn't both more trustworthy and more to-the-point.
I'll grant you that there are much more respectable news outlets than "The Daily Show". However, in practice, given the alternatives of getting the news from ABC, NBC, or FOX, I'd rather people watch the "The Daily Show" instead. Personally, I've more or less given up on the televised media in the US. There is just too much money in it, and too much of an incentive to filter the information for the sake of ratings and public tastes. I get most of my news from "The Economist". Wading through it once a week is more work than watching NBC, but at least it won't fill my head with crap.
Creationism is limited to a vague narrative provided by the Bible. The "science" in creationism is like the wood-grain paneling in a Kia: fake and only for show.
Yeah, see, that's because you were a ChemE. My roommate for three years at GT was (and still is --- he's on the 10 semester plan as well) a ChemE. He IM'ed me yesterday, saying that his homework assignment had him ready to start crying:)
Regarding APs offered in HS. My brother and I attend(ed) the same school as this kid (TJHSST in Northern VA). There is a definite culture of "get college out of the way" there. I had 30 college credits (APs and SAT-IIs) by the time I graduated. My brother will have 40+, on account of the fact that he'll have taken the linear algebra/multivar/diff-eq/prob-stat sequence his junior and senior years (which is common enough that the classes are taught in-school). Then there is that 1%, like this kid, who either come in with BC calc, race through the advanced sequence, then take math at GMU for two years, or just skip the last year of HS entirely and go to college early. Those people always freaked me out (imagine a freshmen in your BC calc class, then imagine a group of them, in the corner)...
This guy's achievement is impressive, no doubt, but I think the credits he came in with, which probably replaced most of his intro classes, helped tremendously. My undergrad program in AE at GaTech had 132 required hours, of which only 53 were in AE. Once you get all of the non-major and intro stuff out of the way, the actual core of the program is very doable in a few semesters. Doing it in two semesters and change is very impressive, but its not like he did four years worth of work in one.
I think the most impressive thing here is how much work he did in high school. 60 credits is about 2 years worth of college work at a normal pace.
You're not seeing the flaw in your reasoning. Does it make sense for me to bitch that the Ford Focus is much slower and more expensive than my Kawasaki motorbike? Does it make sense for me to ask, "well, what car from Ford compares to the bike?" Does it make sense for me to bitch about Ford not making motorbikes? Of course not!
As for what people want: if Apple could make money selling such boxes, they would be. If Steve Jobs is anything, he's good at making money. The simple fact is that even if they did, nobody would buy it. Your friends don't want an Apple machine. By your own words, they want a custom, functional box. So why would they buy from Apple? They wouldn't, they'd buy from Dell or build it themselves. So what purpose does it serve Apple to target a market that doesn't want their products?
Your point #3 highlights why Apple is not growing.
Apple is making money hand over first, so their strategy of not paying too much attention to marketshare doesn't seem to be a bad one.
They're not tagetting a rational market. More people would rather have a beige box than a tiny little cute espresso sipping elite box.
IYou're right in a way, in that what lots of people do want to buy is a cheap beige box running Windows. Sure, Apple would sell such a machine, but why would anybody buy it from them, instead of buying it from Dell?
As for the warranty, I've read the anti-apple websites.
The anti-Apple websites are unreliable, by virtue if their very subject matter. They exist because Apple is held to ridiculously high standards. Take Dell's 240x series of monitors for example. Websites universally laud the 2405 and 2407 for being the best monitors in their class. Yet, Dell is on their 7th revision of the basic 240x design, and its taken that many revisions to sort out the inverter whine, the lopsided stands, the backlight bleeding, the banding on gradients, the fuzzy text, etc. Everybody just accepts it as a fact of life that when you order one of these things, you will have to take Dell up on their "15-day no-questions return" at least once. Yet, everyone denounces Apple for far less serious problems with the MacBook, even though the problems aren't nearly as widespread.
If you look at actual studies of customer satisfaction, say those conducted by consumer reports, Apple is at the very top of the heap.
The only reason I compared against the Mini is because it's the only thing Apple offers that is close to what I needed.
It makes absolutely no sense to compare two products that have entirely different purposes. If Apple doesn't sell the product you want, then complain about that. Don't rig up a comparison that's fundementally flawed.
You're missing the point entirely. It's like saying all those SFF PCs are worthless because they're less expandable and more expensive than your Antec. Expandability and price aren't the point of the Mac Mini. The point is to have a computer that's small, quiet, and unobtrusive. Something that fits on a fancy glass receptionists desk, or in a quiet study. Just because they're comparable in price doesn't mean that the target market of the two things are comparable!
1) The Mini is a low-end machine, and Core 2 is a brand new processor. Even Dell is only fielding Core 2 in its higher end XPS and Precision lines, just like Apple is fielding it in their higher end iMac and Mac Pro lines. The only reason you got it in a lower-end machine is because you built it yourself, which 99% of buyers won't do.
2) Your "custom machine" includes no warrenty and no technical support. That's probably not a problem for you, but it is for Apple's target market.
3) The two products you mentioned aren't in the same market! The Mac Mini is a SFF machine, something which carries a several-hundred dollar premium in PC space (for machines several times as large as the Mini).
The basic problem you have is that Apple doesn't have any product targetted at the market you're talking about, the headless desktop. Apple's desktop is the iMac, which is very competitively priced in its market. For example, to get a machine like the $1500 iMac 20", you'll pay Dell $1850 for a comparable XPS 210. At that price, the two machines have the same processor and RAM, the Dell has 70GB more HDD, a TV tuner, and an USB2 external disk, while the Mac has Wifi/Bluetooth and a much faster GPU. It's also, based on my own experience, more compact, nicer looking, and quieter.
In short, Apple's prices on the Intel Macs are great, if they're selling the product you want. If they're not, then its not fair to make comparisons with products they sell that aren't intended for your market.
This is an informal discussion. I didn't feel the need to cite my figures, for the same reason you didn't feel the need to cite your figure. There is the underlying assumption that we're not just making up numbers. If you were curious, you could've just asked for some links, instead of accusing me falsifying a third of the facts. I granted you the same courtesy when you cited the 10% figure, as I assumed you were using old data, instead of just pulling it out of your ass.
In any case, back to the point at hand. You're wrong. HDTV is booming, your perceptions of it are massively out of date.
These right of way grants were in many cases not given with the owner's constent. It is very common for the government to invoke "eminent domain" to grant right of way for public utilities. In my own state of Virginia, Virginia Power can invoke eminent domain via a granting of power from the state, and if your nice piece of land happens to block the path of a planned power line, they can and will invoke it despite any complaints you may raise.
Who says you'd give rights to a dozen companies to dig up your property? Remember, its your property. If Verizon wants to lay wire across your land, they're going to have to pay rent. They don't, because the government circumvents your property rights and gives them rights that they would not have in a free market.
Of course, I'm not suggesting this as a workable solution. If Verizon had to actually deal with the free market, and obtain the right to lay line on everyone's land, they wouldn't exist. The logistics would be impossible. That's the point. The internet is a public good, like the road systems or sewer systems. The only way these systems can be created is through government circumvention of the fundamental property rights of citizens. Thus, its stupid to argue that government regulation will destroy free market competition, because there is no free market involved.
And you know why there aren't any? Government monopolies!
You can't block Net Neutrality on the grounds that it introduces government regulation to the net, when the very existence of the infrastructure on which the net runs is due to a whole raft of government-granted monopolies, government claims of eminent domain, etc.
The day I can start charging Verizon rent for the lines they keep on my property, instead of just giving them those rights for free because the government tells me to, is the day I'll buy the "no government regulation of the net" argument against Net Neutrality.
The real question then, is what percentage of people have actually bought a new TV set during the past 2 years or so. if only 10% of the public bought a new TV set, then only 4% of the public has HD sets.
I already gave you the statistic for market penetration. 15-17% of TV-owning households have an HDTV, depending on the study (as of early 2006). That's households, not "percentage of TVs that are HD". That number is expected to reach 20% by the end of this year, not surprising since the 15-17% figure already represents a doubling of the market penetration over the same period in late 2004.
So where's the market for Bluray and HD-DVD now? DVD looks fabulous at 720p, it already has the resolution for that.
DVDs look like ass at 720p compared to real HD content. I thought they looked pretty good too, until I watched the World Cup broadcast in HD. DVDs don't even come close to comparing. And that's no surprise --- DVD's have a maximum of 480 lines of resolution. Even on a 720p set, you're scaling the image by more than a factor of two. No matter how many fancy upsampling algorithms you use, you're faced with the simple fact that you're trying to display more than twice as much data as you actually have.
Yes, and more than half the people who buy cars buy mid-range to low-end models. Does that mean luxury cars are a failure in the market? Especially when 81% of the revenue is coming from the luxury product?
HDTV is like SUVs were a few years ago. Still in the luxury market, but with a phenomenal growth rate and a strong trend of lower prices. Now, SUVs are the highest-selling car type on the market. The same will be true for HDTVs over the next few years.
Uh, what? Even 720p is a huge step up from 480p. It's more than double the resolution, in fact, and the support of advanced codecs in HD-DVD and Blu-Ray results in even better picture quality than the resolution would suggest.
You're on crack. HD penetration has been growing tremendously quickly, to the point where the 10% number, which was accurate just a couple of years ago, has long since become obsolete. By the end of 2005, 17% of TV-owning households owned an HDTV. At this rate, by 2010, 57% of TV-watching US households will have an HDTV. That's less than four years from now.
As of June, 41% of all TV sales in the US were HDTVs. Moreover, HDTVs accounted for 81% of TV sales by revenue. At a point when a cheap SDTV can be had for $150, and even a cheap HDTV is several times that, 41% numerically is a huge figure.
There is no definition of "failure" by which you can judge HDTV as having failed in the marketplace. Not when its market penetration growth is over 20-30% year over year!
I see your point, but what I've experienced is that learning C or assembler first makes it very difficult to focus on the higher level concepts afterwards. Your brain becomes programmed to think of things first in terms of registers, pointers, etc, and you have to struggle to think of things more generally.
What I would say, however, is that every CS program should include a course in compilers, where students write own down to the code generation, preferably for a modern machine like x86. Unlike learning ASM (which you'll have to to do this anyway), it won't just teach you the performance characteristics of the machine instructions, but will teach you exactly how high-level language constructs map to the machine.
And of course, a class in profiling and debugging should be required, and I'm astonished that there usually isn't even one in the program. With modern super-scaler processors, where the generated ASM has only a vague resemblence to what is actually being executed, skill with a profiler is absolutely essential in tracking down bottlenecks, etc. It also teaches some intuition about where performance bottlenecks tend to lie, which avoids the tendency I've seen among many C programmers to avoid useful abstraction even in non-critical regions of code.
It's not such a simple dismissal. Reddit is an online, web-based program. Lisp is missing something in these areas, because Lisp is a pre-web phenomenon language. Most of the people who learned it did so before the web became a big thing, and as a result they're often not working in web-related tasks, and thus not creating web-related libraries. The same could be said for C, really. Python has better, easier-to-use, easier-to-drop-in libraries for a lot of web related programming than C, but that doesn't mean that C has unusably few libraries.
Whether Lisp has sufficient libraries for your task depends on your task. It also depends on your budget. A lot of the best Lisp libraries are in implementations like Allegro and Lispworks. Their price is very reasonable for a commercial outfit, but often out of the range of hobbyists and OSS programmers.
The main reason would be to learn programming, instead of focusing on a language.
People who learn C or Java get caught up in the specifics of the language, and have a hard time thinking about the underlying concepts. They think in terms of pointers and blocks of memory, instead of values and functions.
There is a reason Scheme is taught as the first language at places like MIT, where their job is to make computer scientists, not code monkeys.
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I think part of the reason was that Europeans understood Clinton. Clinton thought like a Westerner. He was interested in the economy, trade, diplomacy, and understood that all of these things involved compromises between various entities. This sort of pragmatic mindset has been a hallmark of European thinking for literally hundreds of years. American politics, on the other hand, is intensely ideological. Whereas European politicians argue about things like farm subsidies, American politicians argue about highly abstract (and mostly irrelevent) things like the sanctity of this or that. Europeans are interested in what's "good" or "useful", while Americans are interested in what's "right".
What planet are you on? Under Clinton, planes didn't get diverted because a flight attendent found an empty water bottle in a seat.
Clinton was good. He was a politician, sure, but he was competent.
What could Clinton have done about the Cole bombing? As history shows, trying to root out Al Queda and hunt down bin Laden is a non-trivial military operation. The USS Cole bombing happend in mid October, and it wasn't until well after the elections that it was clear that Al Queda was responsible. That places the earliest possible military operation sometime in late November.
For multiple reasons, a military action in that time frame was impossible. Even under normal circumstances, a President starting a major military operation in the last month of this term is unthinkable. In 2000, the situation was even trickier. Not only was Clinton a lame duck President, but his party had lost a very heated, very bitter, and very controversial election. Any military action at that point would've been viewed by the Republicans, who remember at this time are still isolationist and care nothing about terrorism, as a cheap trick to throw a wrench into Bush's presidency early-on. It would've been viewed by everybody as petty retaliation for the results of the election. Moreover, it would've been terribly ineffective anyway. Transitions are complicated, and switching administrations right in the middle would've been a massive handicap to any potential operation.
Clinton did exactly what he should've done in his position, that was to give his successor the information he had and let him deal with the problem.
John Stewart's show is easily as informative as most "real" news shows that people watch. Watch the local news down here in Atlanta some time then tell me Stewart's show isn't both more trustworthy and more to-the-point.
I'll grant you that there are much more respectable news outlets than "The Daily Show". However, in practice, given the alternatives of getting the news from ABC, NBC, or FOX, I'd rather people watch the "The Daily Show" instead. Personally, I've more or less given up on the televised media in the US. There is just too much money in it, and too much of an incentive to filter the information for the sake of ratings and public tastes. I get most of my news from "The Economist". Wading through it once a week is more work than watching NBC, but at least it won't fill my head with crap.
Creationism is limited to a vague narrative provided by the Bible. The "science" in creationism is like the wood-grain paneling in a Kia: fake and only for show.
So you don't actually know anything, you're just speculating pointlessly?
Yeah, see, that's because you were a ChemE. My roommate for three years at GT was (and still is --- he's on the 10 semester plan as well) a ChemE. He IM'ed me yesterday, saying that his homework assignment had him ready to start crying :)
Regarding APs offered in HS. My brother and I attend(ed) the same school as this kid (TJHSST in Northern VA). There is a definite culture of "get college out of the way" there. I had 30 college credits (APs and SAT-IIs) by the time I graduated. My brother will have 40+, on account of the fact that he'll have taken the linear algebra/multivar/diff-eq/prob-stat sequence his junior and senior years (which is common enough that the classes are taught in-school). Then there is that 1%, like this kid, who either come in with BC calc, race through the advanced sequence, then take math at GMU for two years, or just skip the last year of HS entirely and go to college early. Those people always freaked me out (imagine a freshmen in your BC calc class, then imagine a group of them, in the corner)...
This guy's achievement is impressive, no doubt, but I think the credits he came in with, which probably replaced most of his intro classes, helped tremendously. My undergrad program in AE at GaTech had 132 required hours, of which only 53 were in AE. Once you get all of the non-major and intro stuff out of the way, the actual core of the program is very doable in a few semesters. Doing it in two semesters and change is very impressive, but its not like he did four years worth of work in one.
I think the most impressive thing here is how much work he did in high school. 60 credits is about 2 years worth of college work at a normal pace.
You're not seeing the flaw in your reasoning. Does it make sense for me to bitch that the Ford Focus is much slower and more expensive than my Kawasaki motorbike? Does it make sense for me to ask, "well, what car from Ford compares to the bike?" Does it make sense for me to bitch about Ford not making motorbikes? Of course not!
As for what people want: if Apple could make money selling such boxes, they would be. If Steve Jobs is anything, he's good at making money. The simple fact is that even if they did, nobody would buy it. Your friends don't want an Apple machine. By your own words, they want a custom, functional box. So why would they buy from Apple? They wouldn't, they'd buy from Dell or build it themselves. So what purpose does it serve Apple to target a market that doesn't want their products?
Your point #3 highlights why Apple is not growing.
Apple is making money hand over first, so their strategy of not paying too much attention to marketshare doesn't seem to be a bad one.
They're not tagetting a rational market. More people would rather have a beige box than a tiny little cute espresso sipping elite box.
IYou're right in a way, in that what lots of people do want to buy is a cheap beige box running Windows. Sure, Apple would sell such a machine, but why would anybody buy it from them, instead of buying it from Dell?
As for the warranty, I've read the anti-apple websites.
The anti-Apple websites are unreliable, by virtue if their very subject matter. They exist because Apple is held to ridiculously high standards. Take Dell's 240x series of monitors for example. Websites universally laud the 2405 and 2407 for being the best monitors in their class. Yet, Dell is on their 7th revision of the basic 240x design, and its taken that many revisions to sort out the inverter whine, the lopsided stands, the backlight bleeding, the banding on gradients, the fuzzy text, etc. Everybody just accepts it as a fact of life that when you order one of these things, you will have to take Dell up on their "15-day no-questions return" at least once. Yet, everyone denounces Apple for far less serious problems with the MacBook, even though the problems aren't nearly as widespread.
If you look at actual studies of customer satisfaction, say those conducted by consumer reports, Apple is at the very top of the heap.
The only reason I compared against the Mini is because it's the only thing Apple offers that is close to what I needed.
It makes absolutely no sense to compare two products that have entirely different purposes. If Apple doesn't sell the product you want, then complain about that. Don't rig up a comparison that's fundementally flawed.
You're missing the point entirely. It's like saying all those SFF PCs are worthless because they're less expandable and more expensive than your Antec. Expandability and price aren't the point of the Mac Mini. The point is to have a computer that's small, quiet, and unobtrusive. Something that fits on a fancy glass receptionists desk, or in a quiet study. Just because they're comparable in price doesn't mean that the target market of the two things are comparable!
That's not a fair comparison, for three reasons:
1) The Mini is a low-end machine, and Core 2 is a brand new processor. Even Dell is only fielding Core 2 in its higher end XPS and Precision lines, just like Apple is fielding it in their higher end iMac and Mac Pro lines. The only reason you got it in a lower-end machine is because you built it yourself, which 99% of buyers won't do.
2) Your "custom machine" includes no warrenty and no technical support. That's probably not a problem for you, but it is for Apple's target market.
3) The two products you mentioned aren't in the same market! The Mac Mini is a SFF machine, something which carries a several-hundred dollar premium in PC space (for machines several times as large as the Mini).
The basic problem you have is that Apple doesn't have any product targetted at the market you're talking about, the headless desktop. Apple's desktop is the iMac, which is very competitively priced in its market. For example, to get a machine like the $1500 iMac 20", you'll pay Dell $1850 for a comparable XPS 210. At that price, the two machines have the same processor and RAM, the Dell has 70GB more HDD, a TV tuner, and an USB2 external disk, while the Mac has Wifi/Bluetooth and a much faster GPU. It's also, based on my own experience, more compact, nicer looking, and quieter.
In short, Apple's prices on the Intel Macs are great, if they're selling the product you want. If they're not, then its not fair to make comparisons with products they sell that aren't intended for your market.
This is an informal discussion. I didn't feel the need to cite my figures, for the same reason you didn't feel the need to cite your figure. There is the underlying assumption that we're not just making up numbers. If you were curious, you could've just asked for some links, instead of accusing me falsifying a third of the facts. I granted you the same courtesy when you cited the 10% figure, as I assumed you were using old data, instead of just pulling it out of your ass.
In any case, back to the point at hand. You're wrong. HDTV is booming, your perceptions of it are massively out of date.
These right of way grants were in many cases not given with the owner's constent. It is very common for the government to invoke "eminent domain" to grant right of way for public utilities. In my own state of Virginia, Virginia Power can invoke eminent domain via a granting of power from the state, and if your nice piece of land happens to block the path of a planned power line, they can and will invoke it despite any complaints you may raise.
Who says you'd give rights to a dozen companies to dig up your property? Remember, its your property. If Verizon wants to lay wire across your land, they're going to have to pay rent. They don't, because the government circumvents your property rights and gives them rights that they would not have in a free market.
Of course, I'm not suggesting this as a workable solution. If Verizon had to actually deal with the free market, and obtain the right to lay line on everyone's land, they wouldn't exist. The logistics would be impossible. That's the point. The internet is a public good, like the road systems or sewer systems. The only way these systems can be created is through government circumvention of the fundamental property rights of citizens. Thus, its stupid to argue that government regulation will destroy free market competition, because there is no free market involved.
And you know why there aren't any? Government monopolies!
You can't block Net Neutrality on the grounds that it introduces government regulation to the net, when the very existence of the infrastructure on which the net runs is due to a whole raft of government-granted monopolies, government claims of eminent domain, etc.
The day I can start charging Verizon rent for the lines they keep on my property, instead of just giving them those rights for free because the government tells me to, is the day I'll buy the "no government regulation of the net" argument against Net Neutrality.
You started this whole thread with the erroneous and uncited "less than 10%" figure, so why am I on the hook for citing sources?
You want sources? here are sources. Oh, and this.
The real question then, is what percentage of people have actually bought a new TV set during the past 2 years or so. if only 10% of the public bought a new TV set, then only 4% of the public has HD sets.
I already gave you the statistic for market penetration. 15-17% of TV-owning households have an HDTV, depending on the study (as of early 2006). That's households, not "percentage of TVs that are HD". That number is expected to reach 20% by the end of this year, not surprising since the 15-17% figure already represents a doubling of the market penetration over the same period in late 2004.
So where's the market for Bluray and HD-DVD now? DVD looks fabulous at 720p, it already has the resolution for that.
DVDs look like ass at 720p compared to real HD content. I thought they looked pretty good too, until I watched the World Cup broadcast in HD. DVDs don't even come close to comparing. And that's no surprise --- DVD's have a maximum of 480 lines of resolution. Even on a 720p set, you're scaling the image by more than a factor of two. No matter how many fancy upsampling algorithms you use, you're faced with the simple fact that you're trying to display more than twice as much data as you actually have.
Yes, and more than half the people who buy cars buy mid-range to low-end models. Does that mean luxury cars are a failure in the market? Especially when 81% of the revenue is coming from the luxury product?
HDTV is like SUVs were a few years ago. Still in the luxury market, but with a phenomenal growth rate and a strong trend of lower prices. Now, SUVs are the highest-selling car type on the market. The same will be true for HDTVs over the next few years.
What the hell are you talking about?
All the stuff I cited was from actual studies of HDTV penetration. See, for example, this article: HDTV Sales.
Uh, what? Even 720p is a huge step up from 480p. It's more than double the resolution, in fact, and the support of advanced codecs in HD-DVD and Blu-Ray results in even better picture quality than the resolution would suggest.
You're on crack. HD penetration has been growing tremendously quickly, to the point where the 10% number, which was accurate just a couple of years ago, has long since become obsolete. By the end of 2005, 17% of TV-owning households owned an HDTV. At this rate, by 2010, 57% of TV-watching US households will have an HDTV. That's less than four years from now.
As of June, 41% of all TV sales in the US were HDTVs. Moreover, HDTVs accounted for 81% of TV sales by revenue. At a point when a cheap SDTV can be had for $150, and even a cheap HDTV is several times that, 41% numerically is a huge figure.
There is no definition of "failure" by which you can judge HDTV as having failed in the marketplace. Not when its market penetration growth is over 20-30% year over year!
I see your point, but what I've experienced is that learning C or assembler first makes it very difficult to focus on the higher level concepts afterwards. Your brain becomes programmed to think of things first in terms of registers, pointers, etc, and you have to struggle to think of things more generally.
What I would say, however, is that every CS program should include a course in compilers, where students write own down to the code generation, preferably for a modern machine like x86. Unlike learning ASM (which you'll have to to do this anyway), it won't just teach you the performance characteristics of the machine instructions, but will teach you exactly how high-level language constructs map to the machine.
And of course, a class in profiling and debugging should be required, and I'm astonished that there usually isn't even one in the program. With modern super-scaler processors, where the generated ASM has only a vague resemblence to what is actually being executed, skill with a profiler is absolutely essential in tracking down bottlenecks, etc. It also teaches some intuition about where performance bottlenecks tend to lie, which avoids the tendency I've seen among many C programmers to avoid useful abstraction even in non-critical regions of code.
It's not such a simple dismissal. Reddit is an online, web-based program. Lisp is missing something in these areas, because Lisp is a pre-web phenomenon language. Most of the people who learned it did so before the web became a big thing, and as a result they're often not working in web-related tasks, and thus not creating web-related libraries. The same could be said for C, really. Python has better, easier-to-use, easier-to-drop-in libraries for a lot of web related programming than C, but that doesn't mean that C has unusably few libraries.
Whether Lisp has sufficient libraries for your task depends on your task. It also depends on your budget. A lot of the best Lisp libraries are in implementations like Allegro and Lispworks. Their price is very reasonable for a commercial outfit, but often out of the range of hobbyists and OSS programmers.
The main reason would be to learn programming, instead of focusing on a language.
People who learn C or Java get caught up in the specifics of the language, and have a hard time thinking about the underlying concepts. They think in terms of pointers and blocks of memory, instead of values and functions.
There is a reason Scheme is taught as the first language at places like MIT, where their job is to make computer scientists, not code monkeys.